The Christian Science Monitor reported that Pakistan gave, as its reason for ramping up its nuke arsenal, tensions with India. The claim was met by skepticism even from Democrats.
Pakistani officials say the buildup is a response to the threat from India, which is spending $50 billion over the next five years on its military. “But to say it’s just an issue between just India and Pakistan is divorced from reality,” says former senator Sam Nunn, who co-chairs the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
What else is a lie?
The safety of the world in the coming decades depends on a choice of paths. Down one overgrown trail lies the arduous track to disarming Iran. Down a brightly lit, 16 lane concrete turnpike lies a nuclear armed Iran, glimmering in the distance, attended by the twin edifices of a nuclear armed Saudi Arabia supplied by the arsenal of Islam, Pakistan, the Land of the Pure. Which path will the politicians choose? Put another way, where’s the money at?
The President promised “a world without nuclear weapons”. The Atlantic described the President’s electrifying promise.
Just ten weeks after Inauguration Day in 2009, President Obama used his first overseas trip in office to announce his intention to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The U.S. “must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist: Yes we can,” he told a cheering crowd of 20,000 in Prague’s Hradcany Square, rhetorically linking the no-nukes push to the sky’s-the-limit idealism that had electrified supporters during his recent presidential campaign.
Obama’s high-profile endorsement of what arms-control advocates call “global zero” was a hugely significant step for a U.S. president to take.
But a hugely significant step down which path? Is the world now closer to a “Global Zero” or to a “Global Many”?
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“Global Zero” isn’t a goal, it’s a person.
Hope for change, vote Republican, ‘The Less Worse Party.’
If the Saudia don’t already have Pakistani nukes in their possession, I’ll eat a hat.
Would this not lead to a new Mutually Assured Destruction in that region, a la the old Cold War days?
Are the Paks, Perks, and ‘Rabs as logical as the US and Soviets?
Reminds on of the quote from Twain (I think) as to the feeling one gets when the baby picks up a hammer.
I recall hearing an NPR report when Pakiatan tested its first nuclear weapon and India responded with more nuclear tests, to which Pakistan responded with still more nuclear tests.
Bill Clinton was personally offended that they would do all that on his watch, the great Peacenik who had deployed the US military in the post-Cold War era to over 100 countries.
And it was further explained that CIA analysts had not heeded warnings from Pakistani and Indian leaders of their nuclear efforts because they assumed they were lying, “just like US politicans do.” It was pretty obvious that we had a problem with the CIA way back then.
In any case, the nasty warmongers inevitably bring Peace and the Hope and Change Peaceniks always bring war.
By the way, I just read a report pointing out that the builder of the Bali bombs that killed over 200 people was captured in the same Pakistani town where OBL was killed, following a “tip off to Pakistani security forces.” I wonder if the “tip off” consisted of the Aussies saying “Either you turn him over or we’ll level the whole community”?
All this appears to be going just the way the President wants. Pakistan will be rescued financially by the Saudis. Israel will have two nuclear neighbors. The old nuclear monopoly will be erased by inflation as more countries, especially Islamic ones, gain that capacity. And American exceptionalism continues to decline.
4 Gordon: Are the Paks, Perks, and ‘Rabs as logical as the US and Soviets?
Well, no.
Interesting, the Norks announced they had a bomb but their first test fizzled. Everyone assumes the Israelis have (and South Africa haddid) nukesbut they never anounced it.
Announcements of nuke capability from Iran and KSA are mainly for effect. That doesn’t mean they won’t use them.
Hmmm. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Saudis simply to put themselves under the Pak Nuclear Umbrella right now? Let the Iranians know that Pakistan is ready to unleash a nuclear fusillade at them if anything happens to the land of the two holy cities? After all, there are a lot of Pakistani citizens working in Saudi, and they need to be protected.
But let’s come back to common sense. Nuclear bombs are mostly just bigger bangs — not the creators of the poisoned earth of liberal fantasies. The Japanese were growing (and eating) watermelons in Nagasaki the year after they were bombed. The healthy population of Hiroshima is now something like 4 times what it was when it was bombed.
Maybe one of the experts on this site can correct me on this: I have a vague recollection that the damage done by an explosion goes up with the cube root of the explosive power, i.e. make a bomb one thousand times bigger and it will do only 10 times as much damage. Hence today’s focus on precision guided bombs rather than simply bigger bombs.
If you want me to read your stuff, stop the popups. And get Glenn Reynolds to mention that you did.
There was a big discussion the other day, on how we could get Larry Sheldon to read the stuff here. Funny enough, no one thought to mention removing all the popups. Now we know.
8. Kinuachdrach
the problem with the Russians putting commercial interests over strategic interests in Iran has always been that if the Iranians got nukes, it would set off an arms race in the middle east such that it would be inevitable that the saudis and the turks would soon after get nukes. followed by others later.
This is good for mother Russia? the complete encirclement of mother russia with nuclear armed states. The moslems are the most unstable of all people to boot?
It must be that Americans are happy ennobling enemies of Russian spy agencies. We’re just more fun to have as opponents. Moslems–not so much. But have Russians ever actually been killed by Americans? No. Rather, Russians are killed by moslems all the time.
That’s why Americans listening to Russians dissimulate on behalf of Iran–scratch their heads.
Do Russians even know how to calculate their own interests?
Likely the Russian man on the street would understand what I have said. The same could not be said of an apparatchik.
omg where does one start with this topic? first, if they want some, why delay, why wouldn’t they have bought Soviet/Russian warheads when the buying was good? though, just how do they deliver them, on camelback or FedEx? why not just pay Pakistan to launch on command, keep the filthy goods off the holy soil of SA. or for that matter, pay the US and/or Israel (or Russia, or France) to do the same. pre-position a couple of tons of gold in a vault in West Virginia or Austria or wherever. the prospect of the Sauds buying anything more sophisticated than a garrote is absurd, that is, buying and having their own citizens use, though I suppose they can always hire talent as well. like that $60b in US weapons, don’t even get me started. so as if the Pakistani warheads would work. I expressed and discussed and was perhaps instructed before, on the likely yield and reliability of any Pakistani products, but the bottom line is, who knows. finally I agree, even a handfull of nuke warheads, with FOB delivery mechanisms, isn’t nearly so worrying as our readiness to respond massively to their use. Iran thinks they’re madder than us, welcome them to the modern MAD, and if it comes time to make good on it, so it goes. though perhaps we’ll see, when they walk right up to the edge, just how mad they really are.
the idea of Saudi nukes is like when your seven year old son, drunk on stolen beer, finds you left the loaded mac-10 on the couch.
and the idea of Iranian nukes? sorry, metaphor fails me.
#8. Kinuachdrach
Hmmm. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Saudis simply to put themselves under the Pak Nuclear Umbrella right now? Let the Iranians know that Pakistan is ready to unleash a nuclear fusillade at them if anything happens to the land of the two holy cities? After all, there are a lot of Pakistani citizens working in Saudi, and they need to be protected.
Whatever you can say about the Saudis, being totally stupid is not one of them. Trusting Pakistan is the equivalent of voluntarily letting a pick-pocket do a pat-down search on you, something that should be apparent from our dealings with them in the conflict in Afghanistan.
In terms of dealing with other countries, there isn’t much difference between Pakistan and North Korea. The sooner the world realizes that the better. In the community of nations that are many thugs, but it is the sociopaths we should mostly be concerned with, and Pakistan is one of them.
IT WAS JUST A NEIGHBORHOOD DANCE
The Saudis believe they can dance their way to safety once Iran has a nuke by nuking up the neighborhood. But what tune will the band be playing as King Abdullah, accepting a bow from President Obama, steps to the microphone and sings that old 40s standard, Oh, What It Seemed To Be.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoKThkqCqJM
It was just a neighborhood dance
That’s all that it was
But oh what it seemed to be
It was like a trip to the stars
To Venus and Mars
‘Cause Pakistan’s in love with me
It was just a wedding of nukes
That’s all that it was
But oh what it seemed to be
It was just some nukes at the door
From our friends in Lahore
All Pakistan’s in love with me
And when I touched them, darling
They were more than just some nukes to me
They were the answer, darling
To some folks who’ll steal my oil from me
It was just some people next door
That’s all that it was
But they know just who these are for
So if they’re taking the chance
I am ready to dance
‘Cause Pakistan’s in love with me
“12. Josh
omg where does one start with this topic? first, if they want some, why delay, why wouldn’t they have bought Soviet/Russian warheads when the buying was good?” Because all those Western media claims that former Soviet nukes were being sold on the black market were BS, though there was probably plenty of polonium and low-grade material to be had.
And it’s quite simple — if Iran is hellbent on getting a Bomb, Russia cannot stop them. But it can certainly profit from the resulting tensions and (ka-ching) higher oil prices.
Buying insurance via 3rd party nukes is one of the themes in some of Ken Macleod’s science fiction. The idea being exactly as Josh suggests – that small nations or even ethnic/social groups could buy protection from nuclear powers. Might work, given the massive proliferation about to happen.
Will the world be on fire this time next year, or five years hence? When the little nukes start to come down, will Uncle Sugar step in to stop the blazing wildfire?
So how is that nuclear free world working out, anyways?
Will the Muslim man revert to what he has done most in the last millenia? Turn on his own cousin and co-religionists, and kill each other in the name of some unreachable Islamic purity? If the Saudis have nukes, how soon will it be before Al Qaeda or a like minded faction gets their hands on one?
It looks like the future will be interesting, after all. And history hasn’t ended after all, either.
Kinuachdrach:
“I have a vague recollection that the damage done by an explosion goes up with the cube root of the explosive power, i.e. make a bomb one thousand times bigger and it will do only 10 times as much damage.”
I’m no expert, but I believe it goes as yield to the two-thirds. So a thousand-fold increase in yield gives a hundred-fold increase in destruction, other things being equal. The diminishing returns aren’t as severe as you recall, but you’re absolutely right that a smaller bomb delivered very accurately can be much more destructive than a large bomb delivered less accurately.
Are the Gang that Can’t Hit the Floor With a Fork sitting around in diapers passing the weed? My God in Heaven, when will the adults open the door and throw these idiots out? Could we say to the Russians, Chinese and Muslims, “No fair, we want a Do-Over?”
JPS (#18) and Kinuachdrach (#8) “that a smaller bomb delivered very accurately can be much more destructive than a large bomb delivered less accurately.” Was part of the reasoning behind the Soviets being allowed much larger Nuke warheads in the Start Treaties, US was able to deliver warheads within a hundred feet or so thus more destructive while the Soviets had a mile+ accuracy at the time and less destructive to their targets. It is true the bigger they get the less efficient they are. The best point brought out is by Kinuachdrach (#8) “Nuclear bombs are mostly just bigger bangs — not the creators of the poisoned earth of liberal fantasies.” (Which I have mention here before) Americans where convinced to give up their bomb shelters with a Theory of a Glowing Planet but Kinuachdrach (#8) points out rather well it’s been barely one tenth the “Theory” time of uninhabitable zones after such bombs being used and yet both of the very dirty nuclear bombed cities are very much populated and the people do not have two heads and glow at night, nor are there any dinosaur size cockroaches…. Meanwhile bomb shelter business is very strong in other countries.
Any one at ground zero will be the lucky ones.
How long does it take to empty a supermarket on the announcement of a hurricane on the way?
How long does it take to empty the gas station?
How much food do you have stockpiled?
How much fuel?
How much ammo?
Gold and silver are touted as the panacea for currency collapse. In what are they denominated? Hmm?
Could you defend your stockpiles?
Which world power will be the first to write n x 10^6 in casualty column?
The world is getting more and more unstable. And your terrible ifs accumulate.
@ 20. CharllesWhite,
The Russians faked the telemetry from their missiles to mislead us as to their CEP. I wouldn’t be surprised if we did the same.
Global Zero might really mean that at the end of the day everybody’s shot their entire wad with zero remaining. It sometimes looks like that’s what’s being set up.
Suppose the Saudis by nukes from the Paks and they turn out to be duds?
Pakistan doesn’t strike me as a bastion of quality control.
Prepping = good. Wasting time arguing with fools who want to keep printing money to fight wars we can’t afford = bad.
“Saudi Arabia’s actions might lead the casual observer to ask why if Israel were the boogeyman of the Middle East and the existential threat to Muslims everywhere — Saudi Arabia never really worried about the Jewish nuclear bomb, but only as it seems, about another Muslim one? .”
Perhaps the Saudis realize that, unlike Iran, Israel has no pretensions of empire.
“I have a vague recollection that the damage done by an explosion goes up with the cube root of the explosive power, i.e. make a bomb one thousand times bigger and it will do only 10 times as much damage.”
I recall an nuclear engineer telling me many years ago that there’s a knee in the curve regrading megatonnage. After a certain point, you can only push a shock wave so fast, and all shock waves decay at the same rate according to a fixed set of physics. Thus, from the perspective of having a limited amount of nuclear material, it doesn’t make sense to keep building ever-bigger bombs. (And no, I don’t know where that knee lies regarding megatonnage.)
Good point about the Pakistani nukes being “duds”. Well, of course, the KSA will want to test one. Maybe in the empty quarter.
That will convince the Iranians that they are serious. Seriously mad.
Paraphasing Mr. Selleck as Matthew Quigley: “I said we never had much use for nukes. Never said we didn’t know how to use ‘em.”
In the early 1980′s I did some gummint work on nuclear civil defense, and had occasion to study up and get some information from nuclear engineers & others as tech advisors. My recollection of the concepts is consistent with that of several other posters, that you get diminishing returns from megatonnage, varying with the cube root of blast energy. In addition, the atmosphere, blast altitude, and geometry of the landscape can profoundly influence the unfolding of the energy dispersion, sometimes resulting in a major fraction of the blast energy simply being directed up&outward from the earth’s surface.
And again, it’s worth mentioning that both Russia and China in living memory of some of their leaders, have seen dramatic evidence that their countries can sustain the loss of a huge portion of their population and yet emerge intact from a major military conflict.
We’ve grown up in the West with the sense that our culture is desolate when a dozen police officers “gang up” and take down a single suspect, or fail to “shoot the gun out of a bad guy’s hand” and put a round in the suspects’ main body mass instead.
I’d like to see the negotiator that can gentle a Mullah steeped in the Holy Words of the Qur’an.
Hmmm. Didn’t someone post here that Syria has been refining their Desert Phosphate deposits and culling the Uranium content for decades? Where do you suppose all the Uranium from those countless tonnes of Phosphates end up?
Assuming that there has been an appropriate amount of pre-planning and consultation in the design phase between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia; if there has been the mentioned quid pro quo between the two, Saudi Arabia is about as close to having a workable nuclear deterrent as Japan. And Japan is probably a few turns of a wrench from having one it they so decide.
All data open source.
Between 1987 and March 1988 China sold between 60-120 CSS-2 missiles [minus warheads] to Saudi Arabia along with 16-24 launchers.
Throw-weight (kg): 2,000
Yield: 1 @ 700-3000 KT
3 @ 50-100 KT
3 @ 10-20 KT ???
conventional HE
Propellant: Storable
Deployment: Soft
Configuration: Single Stage
Length [meters]: 24
Diameter [meters]: 2.25
Mass [kilograms]: 64,000
Guidance: Inertial
CEP (meters): 1,000 – 4,000
Launch Preparation Time: 120-150 minutes
Range: 2500 KM/2000 KG warhead weight
50 with 8-12 launchers are based at Al Sulayyil Missile Base 20°43’07″N 45°35’01″E
imagery:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/saudi/al-sulayyil-imagery.htm
There is much more available.
50 with 8-12 launchers are based at Al Joffar [or Al Jufayr] Missile Base. There is some dispute in published sources as to the exact coordinates. It is about 100 miles south of Riyadh, and approximately 24 degrees 13′ 08″N, 46 degrees 17′ 56″ E.
As with anything to do with maintenance issues in the Ummah; there is the reasonable doubt as to the readiness of these older missiles. Thus, the procurement of new ones may be necessary. But it is also possible that once compatible warheads are acquired, they will be technically operational.
We are getting into THREE CONJECTURES territory here.
Thank you, Buraq Hussein Obama, for making a nuclear exchange inevitable.
Subotai Bahadur
It seems the Middle East is all ready to turn itself into a glass parking lot without any help from us at all.
The Conjectures would seem to devolve to Israel, if Saudi Arabia et al nuke up. If the Shia and Sunnis slug it out with Thermonuclear weapons, what confidence could they have that one won’t head their way?
MORE LIKELY THAN THE HOUSE OF SAUD BUYING A PAKISTANI NUKE, IS IRAN: IRAN PROBABLY HAS ALREADY PURCHASED A FEW NUKES FROM PAKISTAN OR NORTH KOREA OR BOTH AND WILL SOON DETONATE ONE UNDERGROUND, CLAIM IT’S ONE OF THEIRS AND THAT THEY HAVE MORE – THEREBY ATTAINING DETERRENCE.
THIS IS WHAT THEY’VE BEEN RECENTLY TOUTING WITH THEIR “JUST YOU WAIT AND SEE!” THREATS.
Can you think of ONE good reason why a starving North Korea would NOT sell warheads to Iran for hard currency? It makes even more sense that Palistan would sell warheads to Saudi Arabia, a past friend with plenty of cash. Neville Chute had it right in 1960 in “On the Beach,” he just missed the timing by 60 years. What a mess. Don’t forget than Iran is building a missile base in Venezuela — something studiously ignored by the media — where their IRMB’s will be in range of America. I guess that Obama has abandoned The Monroe Doctrine, since anyone under 50 has probably never heard of it. Too busy giving out Food Stamps, I guess.
One major difference between the Cold War and a Saudi Arabia vs. Iran nuclear stand-off is the distance the missiles have to travel. There was enough distance between the major population centres and military sites of the USA and USSR that a pre-emptive strike was unlikely to succeed. Each side had time to assess whether a warning of incoming missiles was real or just a sensor glitch, and time to launch their retaliation.
That’s not so with Saudi Arabia and Iran. So there will always be a temptation to believe that a pre-emptive strike might succeed, and a fear that the other side is planning one. There will be little or no time to determine whether an attack warning is real or just an instrumentation problem, and a much greater reliance on automated systems to trigger a retaliatory launch in time.
Even without the added problem of Islamic fanaticism there would be a much higher risk of nuclear war than there was in the Cold War.
RebeccaH,
If only…. if only someone could have anticipated this.
Andrew (36), doesn’t that sound just like the run-up to WWI? Exactly the same concept, just on an orders-of-magnitude time scale. Damn, I hate it when history rhymes.
Alas, there aren’t enough adults – never were – to match the number of idiotarians who might vote. A sad legacy of the abuses of the Jim Crow Party and their street-action auxiliary, the KKK, is that our elected officials outlawed requiring voters to prove their basic competence to vote. Our elected officials meant well and were most assuredly doing the Will Of The People (the do-gooder people, anyway) but you know what the paving stones on the famous Road To Hell are, don’t you?
36. Andrew
“One major difference between the Cold War and a Saudi Arabia vs. Iran nuclear stand-off is the distance the missiles have to travel”
We recently sold KSA a few AEGIS systems, iirc delivery next year. Wonder if we will link up the KSA BMD to the radar in Turkey…
#40 Jay
We recently sold KSA a few AEGIS systems, iirc delivery next year. Wonder if we will link up the KSA BMD to the radar in Turkey…
I admit to being a bloody minded and highly suspicious sort. Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa. The mention of AEGIS and Saudi Arabia reminded me of something that I have noted before.
The assumption has been that the presence of American CVBG’s [including SM-3 equipped AEGIS cruisers and destroyers] in the Persian Gulf is intended to protect the rest of the Middle East from an Iranian strike. I note that AN/SPY-1 radars and fire control systems track anything in their range. It is a matter of what they are ordered to fire at. I have more than a passing suspicion that with this particular National Command Authority, the primary mission will be to defend Iran and the rest of the Ummah from an Israeli strike. An Iranian and/or Saudi strike on Israel, not so much. In fact, from the known locations of Iranian nuclear and missile facilities [plus the range/payload limitations of the SAJIIL-2 missile that is the most likely Iranian missile strike weapon], blocking an Iranian launch against Israel would be difficult from the locations the US fleet would be at. Any attempt to block the Iranian missiles would be a “stern chase”.
Subotai Bahadur
#35 Joseph McNulty: “Can you think of ONE good reason why a starving North Korea would NOT sell warheads to Iran for hard currency?”
My guess would be that they haven’t figured out how to sufficiently refine the uranium / plutonium so that it goes boom when triggered. Both of their tests are suspicious and some believe they were both fizzles. They sell what they can successfully build and operate – which is why they have been selling the SCUD variants to the Iranians as launch vehicles. Cheers -